Lord, send us the people nobody else wants.”
That was the bold prayer that set Grace Church, now a multi-site United Methodist congregation in Southwest Florida, on course for a future defined by outreach to “the least of these.”
When Jorge Acevedo became pastor of Grace in 1996, the church was in a five-year decline. At its height, the church had reached 1,000 in attendance. By the time Jorge arrived, attendance had dropped by nearly 75 percent. The church was deep in debt, had unpaid bills, and was under scrutiny from the IRS for back payroll taxes.
Worse, from Jorge’s perspective, the church’s neighborhood had changed, but the church had not. Growth and health would come only with a commitment to outreach.
Grace Church’s neighbors were indeed “the people nobody else wants”—addicts, prostitutes, and alcoholics. Outreach to the church’s neighbors required a commitment to recovery ministry.
Discovery of Recovery
Today Grace Church operates one of the largest recovery ministries in America, with more than 800 people involved each week.
“For many pastors,” Jorge explains, “their ministry passions come out of their own pain; and that’s true for me.” Jorge had experienced the pain that addiction brings, and he had witnessed it in the lives of his parents, sister, and brothers. “As a pastor, I see the wreckage in peoples’ lives, and I know churches typically aren’t safe places to talk about this stuff.”
So Grace Church decided to do ministry in a way that incorporates the openness of recovery ministry.
But recovery was not always a part of the church’s—or Acevedo’s—vision for discipleship.
Jorge grew up with two parents who were functional alcoholics. They were good parents, he explains, but drinking and partying were part of his family’s heritage. Jorge took his first drink in childhood and was an alcoholic by the time he was a senior in high school. Fortunately, Jorge became a Christian through the ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ just before his 18th birthday. He actively followed Jesus, but the charismatic church he joined upon his conversion discouraged him from seeking professional help for his addiction. Instead, he was encouraged to pray it away.
“I was a Christian basically white-knuckling recovery,” he says. He stayed away from alcohol, but the approach took a toll.
“I was a very angry husband, father, seminary student, and youth pastor,” he says. “I should have been in working the steps, but I was not.” Recovery and faith seemed totally unrelated.
That began to change when Jorge’s older brother contacted him to say that he was sick and tired of his own addiction to drugs. Jorge was pastoring in Kissimmee, Florida, at the time, and he found out about a Lutheran recovery center nearby. Recovery and faith began coming together in Jorge’s mind.
“The light came on,” he says, “but gradually. It was like turning on a dimmer switch.”
Several years later, Jorge joined a church staff in Fort Lauderdale. Another pastor on the staff was, like Jorge, an adult child of an alcoholic, who started attending Celebrate Recovery. And the worship pastor there was an alcoholic in recovery. In talking with them about recovery, Jorge realized the boon a better understanding of recovery could be for discipleship.
As Jorge sees it, the church isn’t always effective in helping people recover from sin in their lives. Most churches handle the first three steps of recovery pretty well: (1) “We admitted we were powerless over [sin]—that our lives had become unmanageable, (2) came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, (3) and made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.” But if this is where the process stops, people never experience lasting change. It is not until steps four and five that people begin to address their defects of character and find resources for maintaining their recovery.
The guiding principle behind the ministry at Grace Church is “not that everyone needs Celebrate Recovery but that everybody needs recovery. Everyone’s in recovery from sin.”
Granted, some behaviors carry heavier consequences. “The guy struggling with meth addiction has a whole different set of hurdles and consequences than the gal going through a series of bad relationships.”
Even so, the great equalizer is the recognition that everyone at Grace Church—in every church—is in need of recovery from anything that gets in the way of their relationship with God. That may be grief or loneliness. It could be abuse. It could be bad religion. Regardless, Grace Church works to get people connected with a ministry in the church that will help them work through the steps of recovery.
Safe Place, Dangerous Message
Grace Church wants to create a congregation that, in Jorge’s words, is “a safe place for the dangerous message of Jesus.”
By a “safe place,” Jorge means a community that practices radical hospitality. It is not un-common to find “bikers and hookers and drug addicts” and members of the GLBT community at Grace Church on a given Sunday. The ministries they offer are geared to such as these—they host dances, Alcoholics Anonymous, and have a smoking section.
By “the dangerous message of Jesus,” Jorge means the good news that Jesus is happy to meet you in your addiction, but he doesn’t want to leave you there. “Jesus gets in our business,” Jorge explains, “he confronts our crap.” The dangerous message is that Jesus is willing to tell you, “You’re a dirtbag of a husband, and a racist, by the way.” The dangerous message is the promise of transformation by the power of the cross.
Not surprisingly, this approach means Grace Church takes heat from all sides. More traditional churches view the church’s approach as encouraging immoral behavior. Jorge calls these churches “dangerous places with a dangerous message.” They may preach a biblical gospel, but they do not provide a safe environment in which sinners feel comfortable being transparent about their sin.
At the same time, more liberal churches view Grace Church as too conservative, because it doesn’t affirm the lifestyles of the people it reaches. Jorge calls these churches “safe places with a safe message.” They welcome everyone but fail to provide the good news of transformation.
Grace Church doesn’t mind the criticism. They feel their church, with a radically welcoming environment and a life changing message, is a vision of the Kingdom of God as Jesus described it. Consequently, they pray that God will “send us the people nobody else wants.”
Ministry in Between
One of the challenges, Jorge admits, is that recovery takes some people a long time. “The razor edge we walk on is that a Christian’s positional reality and conditional reality don’t always match.” The positional reality, for Christians, is “there is now, therefore, no condemnation.” But someone’s conditional reality may still be addiction, or dealing with the consequences of past addiction. Knowing how to handle this tension takes discernment and demands making difficult decisions.
One practical issue, for example, is deciding whether someone is ready to serve in the church before they’ve “completed” their recovery. Jorge faced this question head-on a couple of years ago. After a Christmas Eve service, he prayed with a young woman to receive Christ. As she was jotting down her contact information, he asked her what she did for a living.
“I’m a dancer,” she said. (And “she didn’t mean ‘ballerina,'” he clarifies.)
Since then, she’s been discipled by a staff member, is reading the Bible daily, and regularly attends a women’s Bible study. But she’s been slow to give up her job. The issue was forced when she expressed interest in volunteering for VBS.
“Do you let a Christ follower who is moving out of that lifestyle—and she is moving—serve in ministry with kids?” Ultimately, the church staff decided to let her serve in an auxiliary role in which she did not work directly with children.
I pressed him: why shouldn’t her lifestyle disqualify her from service in the church?
“If the statistics are true,” he replied, “then 75 percent of men—both inside and outside the church—regularly look at pornography. We’re talking about the sin we know against the sin we don’t know. How can we with integrity single out the woman who’s on the journey and is at least honest about it?” The church staff has been honest with her about how they view her lifestyle decisions. And recently, Jorge says, she’s been taking action to leave that lifestyle behind.
The church’s decision to let those in recovery serve in the church is informed by the recovery program influence. Jorge explains, “When a guy shows up drunk at an AA meeting, the way they help him is to tell him to go make the coffee. Be quiet, and serve. This is something the church doesn’t do well. The church tends to say you can’t serve at all until you’re in a certain place. That’s very subjective.”
When a guy shows up drunk at an AA meeting, the way they help is to tell him to make coffee, be quiet, and serve.
Jorge admits that their policy is subjective, too. But rather than deciding who is fit to serve based which sinful behaviors disqualify and which don’t, Grace Church’s approach “is based on relationships.” Regarding the dancer who wanted to work with children, Jorge explained, “There could have been another gal in the same situation but who had a different disposition [i.e., not growing in the faith], and we wouldn’t have let her serve. If a person’s not in recovery, not in Bible study, and not growing, they don’t serve.” Making these decisions requires the Grace Church staff to know their people well.
That said, Grace Church holds volunteers to high standards. Some time ago, a man on their elder board—a sex addict in recovery—lapsed. “We found him, helped him, and removed him from the board,” Jorge says. “He’s still around. But we’re not quick to put him back in leadership. Maybe someday.”
Protocol for a staff member struggling with sin of whatever kind is to get that person on a recovery plan. In the past, one of the church’s staff members had a problem with anger. “He was vomiting on people relationally.” Church leaders insisted that he be in recovery. Unfortunately, the behavior continued. Eventually he was terminated.
“We’ll work on the recovery even after employment is terminated,” Jorge explains. “It’s not a question of whether you’re a child of God or a person of worth; it’s a matter of whether you can work here.”
No More Us Vs. Them
It has taken time to change the church’s culture so that it is a safe environment for folks in recovery.
Grace Church launched Celebrate Recovery in January 2000. Jorge estimates it took 6-7 years to reach the “tipping point,” when the majority of the church adopted the ministry vision. Jorge sees evidence of the change in the fact that longtime church members are increasingly hospitable to the newer ones who were attracted by the church’s recovery programs. “We have less of the us/them stuff going on today.”
Jorge cites as a recent example an email he received from “one of the more refined families in our church.” The man was writing to tell Jorge he planned to bring a friend’s child to a recovery program himself. “He wouldn’t have done that ten years ago,” Jorge says. “He might have referred him, but he wouldn’t have brought him.”
Making the Change
Making a church a safer place for people in recovery takes time. “Preparing your congregation for the tattoos, strippers, and guys from prison is a slow transition.” He recommends reminding the congregation of Jesus’ words: “I did not come for the healthy but the sick.”
“We talk about the ‘red letters’ a lot around here. Who did Jesus hang out with?”
Another important factor is the pastor’s example. Jorge models the authenticity he hopes to see in his congregation. But this has to be done wisely. It’s certainly possible to talk too much about your own struggles.
“I had a colleague who confessed a sex addiction,” Jorge says. “The congregation took it well. But it was all he could talk about. It’s like every service was a therapy session. I mention alcohol maybe once or twice a year.” To ensure they’re sharing appropriately, Jorge encourages pastors to consider whether they are sharing for their own good and glory or for the good and glory of God. “It can’t be about eliciting sympathy from the congregation.” On the whole, though, Jorge suspects most pastors tend to be more guarded than they need to be. So be honest. “I think those little portals into our lives are helpful for people.”
Ten years after Jorge started praying, “Lord, send us the people nobody else wants,” he added an important clause: “and nobody else sees.” This included “the poor and marginalized, those with HIV/AIDS, the unemployed, single parents, and others who suffer quietly and often invisibly in our own community,” he says. These folk are often overlooked by traditional ministries. They are also the kinds of folk that can make a ministry unpredictable, messy, un-ruly. But after all, as Jesus put it, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Mt. 9:12).
And that is precisely what convinces Jorge that the outreach ministry of Grace Church is focused on the right people.
Brandon O’Brien is a Ph.D. student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and teaches world religions at College of Dupage near Chicago.
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